This quarter, the New Media Studies Master’s program is offering a new special topics course, Social Media Content Strategy. The course, taught by adjunct professor Brent Waugh, investigates a range of social media and content strategy topics, including how to integrate digital and traditional forms of marketing, best practices for social media use, how to use social analytics, and how to maintain a personal brand.
Students in the class have read timely books on social media, including Jonah Berger’s Contagious: Why Things Catch On and Erik Qualman’s Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business. Class assignments include weekly tweets and a group Tumblr blog on content strategy. Discussion with classmates on social networks like Twitter is encouraged, as is live tweeting insights during class. Over the quarter, students have amassed a significant amount of content on Twitter under the hashtag #DPUSocial.
As a culminating project, students will work in teams to develop a social media strategy for a local nonprofit. This project allows students to apply all that they have learned in the course, and to better understand how to create a year-long social media strategy for an organization.
The course instructor, Brent Waugh, holds a Masters in Science in Communication with a focus on Journalism and Electronic Media from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and has nearly ten years of marketing and communications experience in the nonprofit and higher education sectors. In addition to teaching at DePaul, Waugh is the Digital Community Manager at Northwestern University.
Asked what he wants students to learn in the course, Waugh said, “Students in this class will be able to recognize why some ideas go viral, while others do not, and have the ability to apply these concepts to social media campaigns. I’d like students to be able to identify — and use — a wide variety of social media platforms. I hope my students will understand the importance of metrics and be able to utilize analytics tools.” Ultimately, Waugh says he hopes the course gives students “the ability to articulate the power and importance of social media and to serve as champions for social and social media content strategy in their workplaces.”